


Future Consideration

by hopeless_eccentric



Series: (Free! That's right! Free!) Penumbra Commissions [37]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Character Study, Gen, Minor Character Death, Moral Ambiguity, Recovery, Squeaky Pete, Trans Peter Nureyev, by that i mean kid nureyev, by that i mean mag dont worry, i would die or kill for squeaky pete, the age old argument of good memories of a person vs their bad actions, the angst and hurt/comfort are unrelated it's a lot of dramatic irony, this is like. back and forth fluff and Pain, top surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:15:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28642800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeless_eccentric/pseuds/hopeless_eccentric
Summary: Peter doubted he would remember many of these hazy, post-operation minutes. If the memory remained, it would blur beyond recognition. It was blurring already, for he could have sworn the familiar fingers that ruffled the thick, dark hair he was proud to say looked just like his father’s were running soothing lines upon his scalp. The last time Mag had been that gentle, he had been eight years old and quaking like a leaf.Rec fill for a lovely anon!
Relationships: Mag & Peter Nureyev
Series: (Free! That's right! Free!) Penumbra Commissions [37]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1921492
Comments: 20
Kudos: 56





	Future Consideration

**Author's Note:**

> oh man. ive spent a lot of time wanting to give mag the time and nuance that a nuanced character like that honestly deserves. damn good writing on kabert's part. im just saying if you want a mag gets a solid revenge bap and everything's jolly fic, this isn't it. i know in general, as an author, i try to leave on a happy ending. this one doesnt really have one of those. i think trying to force an easy conclusion on the story would be a disservice to characterization, so there's my PSA out of the way
> 
> i'll have something a little more fun up tomorrow, so dont you worry if this isnt your style ;D
> 
> Content warnings for discussion of murder, surgery, use of anesthetics, blood mention, mag-typical manipulation, discussion of unhealthy parent-child relationships, nausea mention

Peter Nureyev’s throat seemed to wake up before the rest of him could manage to pry itself from a heavy, chemical sleep. He wouldn’t have been aware of this matter had his throat not wheezed out a dry, bone-tired groan that fizzled out into the pillow when his head flopped over.

He tried to remember where he was, but his head felt cotton-stuffed with the unfamiliar luxury of anesthetic, while his bones ached with the pressure of the same exhaustion. The last time he had felt anything close to this sore or this weighted into a soft bed, he had been frozen half-blue and looking into the face of a stranger who had squeezed his gray fingertips in his own and held compresses to his forehead until Peter was cognizant enough to murmur out his own name.

Peter doubted he would remember many of these hazy, post-operation minutes. If the memory remained, it would blur beyond recognition. It was blurring already, for he could have sworn the familiar fingers that ruffled the thick, dark hair he was proud to say looked just like his father’s were running soothing lines upon his scalp. The last time Mag had been that gentle, he had been eight years old and quaking like a leaf.

“Pete, my boy,” Mag murmured, and when Peter finally found it within him to lift his eyelids, his face contorted in confusion.

“Mag—“ he started hoarsely, the word going dry on his lips as he tried to swallow again. “What are you doing?”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” Mag cut him off, his words as firm as they were gentle.

“Oh,” Peter returned, the word coming out slow and heavy.

“How are you feeling?”

“How I’m feeling,” Peter slurred thoughtfully. “I’m very tired.”

“That would make sense,” Mag smiled. “I’ll make sure that you get your rest.”

“I’m fine,” Peter tried to protest, though he barely made it an inch off the bed before his body gave up.

“Pete,” Mag began sternly.

“First rule of thieving,” Nureyev mumbled through a yawn.

“I don’t think you need to worry about stealing anything but a few winks, my boy.”

Between fixing Nureyev’s hair where surgery and the less loving hands of rebel doctors had messed it up and the proud smile that left Peter’s chest warm and fuzzy, he couldn’t help a returning grin. However, the soft thing that bloomed in Mag’s great, owl-like eyes was almost pitying, so Peter could only assume his attempt at a smile had been pathetic at best.

“You’ve had quite the day, Pete,” Mag continued. “If you want to go back to sleep, I wouldn’t blame you. I’ve had my share of surgeries, but at your age, I think I would’ve gone right back to sleep too. There’s no shame in it.”

“Can I see my chest first?” He tried to ask with some iota of defiant strength in his voice, though the words slurred and murmured away when holding his head up became too much of a burden on his neck and his head lolled over into the pillow.

“In due time, my boy,” Mag chuckled. “I can’t take your bandages off just yet.”

Peter heard himself huff and Mag laughed again.

“If it makes you feel better, you can always look down,” Mag added.

“Don’t wanna move,” Peter heard himself mumble into the pillow. “My head’s so heavy.”

“I’ll give you a hand with it, then,” Mag smiled, and before Peter knew it, one of those firm hands was tipping his head upwards with unimaginable gingerness, as if a single wrong movement would break him altogether. 

He would come to wish, by and large, that Mag had been more concerned about things like that. 

For the time being, he felt an untidy smile spill across his face.

“Mag, it’s—“ Peter choked on something running from his eyes. It could very well have been from the anesthesia. However, he felt a watery gasp sputter past his lips and caught a worried expression in Mag’s eyes until he smiled. “It’s perfect.”

Mag offered him a genuine grin in return, and Nureyev’s breath caught in his throat. Such smiles were reserved for particularly clever plans or knife work or the occasional times when one of his hands would reach into a head that used to be at the height of his elbow and ruffle Peter’s hair with all his might.

Smiles from Mag weren’t uncommon, per se, but that exact look so often accompanied a tall tale of his father or some forlorn wish that he had lived long enough to see his son becoming a man. The sight of the look was enough to make something in Peter’s chest twist and something on his face soften, even if he was chemically relaxed to begin with. Mag seemed to notice, for he did his best to reach over and give Peter’s shoulder a supportive squeeze in a way that wouldn’t harm any of his bandaging.

“I’m glad it all went right,” Mag returned. “I’m sorry to say you won’t have the best nursing care in the world, but you have to understand, this is a rebel hospital, my boy—“

“Mag, I know,” Peter chuckled. “I don’t care, just so long as it doesn’t get infected.”

Mag squeezed his forearm, his touch still almost frail in its delicacy. 

In two years time, that same grasp would attempt a futile reach towards Peter’s face, having donned wide eyes and a hard jaw and a splatter of his father’s blood. For the time being, the hands that would threaten to kill millions continued to dote over the young man who would, in turn, kill their owner. 

The hand that would grasp at his face squeezed his arm and the hand that refused to reach for his own knife gave Peter’s hair a friendly, though uncharacteristically gentle ruffle. The mouth that would gasp and choke on its own blood pulled into a friendly smile, and Peter Nureyev’s stomach did not turn at the sight of it.

“Your father would be so proud of you, Pete,” he mused.

In time, Nureyev would spit on the memory, though after enough years to leave him closer in age to his father figure than the terrified teenage revolutionary who haunted the memory of New Kinshasa, he would wonder if Mag was trying to express his own pride in one twisted way or another.

“For what?” He had asked at the time, a smile on his lips and a feeling as sweet as guitar in a city square blooming in his chest.

“Well, I think you’ve been awfully brave to go through this procedure in a rebel hospital,” Mag began, his hand fixing the damage he had just done to Peter’s hair while Nureyev pretended to be offended by it all. “And well—you’re starting to look all grown up on me, Pete. I can’t believe I’m watching your father’s boy become a man right before my very eyes. You look more and more like him every day, you know.”

Later, Nureyev would try his best to neatly file the thought away. Mag never had seen him become a man in the eyes of the law, even though Nureyev knew well that he had earned that title the moment he drove a blade through the chest of the only father who mattered. 

At the time, however, he still found himself in the aching, yet pleasant bliss of a song played to the tune of a heart monitor and the distant chatter of the rebel hospital. He let his mind fade in and out of the moment, with Mag fixing his hair and the memory of his pride and the pride of a supposed father still blooming warm in his chest. He was safe and warm and cared for, and for a moment, he appreciated that just as much as his future self had wished he had appreciated every blissfully ignorant moment in his entire life.

“Mag,” he eventually yawned. “What are those clippers for?”

Mag glanced back at the table Nureyev had tried to gesture at by flopping an arm in that direction.

“Well, I know how much that first haircut meant to you, and you’re old enough to start making your own decisions with your hair, but I just thought if you wanted to keep it short, but couldn’t cut it for yourself,” Mag paused to gesture with the clippers. “I might as well give you a helping hand.”

“Am I going to be down for that long?”

Mag’s smile faltered.

“I don’t know, Pete,” he admitted. “You’re an awfully tough young man, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you made a faster recovery than most. I don’t think it’s wise to make you get up too early. The first rule of thieving—“

“An injured thief is a heist already sabotaged,” Peter yawned.

“Very good.”

Peter merely hummed.

In time, he would come to hate those rules of thieving that haunted him like Mag’s vengeful ghost, even if he knew well his father figure had committed the cardinal sin of being unable to hate Peter, even with a knife in his hand and Mag’s own blood splattered on his face. He supposed every wave of guilt and grief and rage would have been easier if Mag had merely been a tyrant in every moment of his existence. However, even the young man with the shaking hands and sputtering words and the only father he had ever known dying in his arms knew that no man, good or bad, ever acted as such for his every waking moment.

The hazy memory of the hospital bed was one he wished he could file away and lose forever. However, there had been a certain potency to it he couldn’t seem to eradicate.

Peter Nureyev had smiled, believing that Mag cared for him and his father would have been so proud. Even with a deep, pained ache in his bones and a buzzing in his head, he knew well that he was cared for better than any citizen in New Kinshasa with a real nurse. Even if Mag said he was beginning to look like a man, he could lean into the childish urge to be swallowed whole by the mattress as a caring parent fixed his hair and told him he was brave for enduring a painful procedure under less than ideal circumstances. 

He didn’t have to be a man yet. For now, he could be a loved, cared for, and deliriously happy teenager.

Some days, he longed for the simple perfection of his early recovery. Other days, his fingers carded over the old file with nothing but the urge to throw it out entirely. He knew it wouldn’t do anything constructive to try and skew his memories of Mag as anything darker than reality, even with the added layer of context.

Peter Nureyev had been loved. He had also been manipulated for personal gain. He supposed, at the end of the day, the two things weren’t mutually exclusive.

Knowing that didn’t help him wash the blood off his hands, nor did it stop him from spending years wincing at the sound of a guitar strummed with all the tenderness of a parental hand fixing surgery-mussed hair. It also didn’t kill the urge to go into his mental filing system and rearrange and redact half a room’s worth of papers until his childhood had been rendered into something either palatable or forgotten entirely.

No matter his efforts, Nureyev was sure he couldn’t ever skew his memory one way or another. Something cold throbbed in his chest whenever he tried to think too kindly of the old man, while the same thing threatened to break when he tried to pretend he had not, once, found comfort in him.

In a makeshift hospital room a million miles away and a million years ago, Peter Nureyev felt himself drifting off to sleep, not knowing that the man positioning his pillows so he wouldn’t get a neck cramp would bleed out in his arms in two year’s time, nor that his hands, currently limp with exhaustion, would bear the knife. In two years, he would have no name nor home nor family. In two years, he would spend half an hour in a public bathroom trying and failing to scrub blood off of his hands. 

For the time being, he slept without worries of rules of thieving or filing anything away. He was safe and loved and cared for, for all he knew. If there was anything in the world to worry about, he could file it away for future considering.

**Author's Note:**

> well. ouch
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading!! Make sure to SMASH that kudos button and leave a comment down below (no threat for this one i love you all and drink your water)
> 
> Check me out on tumblr @hopeless-eccentric or on twitter @withane22 !!


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